Ask your mom or ask your dad

So I’m starting to regret bringing my Macbook to Zanzibar. It’s perpetually dusty everywhere and my fresh white keyboard has turned a grimy shade of brown. I went to plug in a flash drive today and a spider crawled out of the USB port. It’s got me wondering if Apple covers insect-induced short circuits?

Now that Ramadhan is finished, my host organization’s doors finally opened… on the one-month anniversary of arriving in Zanzibar. Luckily, my intern predecessor kept some seriously intricate records of her 8-month internship and it looks like I’ve got plenty of work to do. My main responsibility is writing “profiles” of our network of preschools, which often involves me visiting these schools: hanging out with the kids, listening to their stories, taking pictures and so on… my first school visit is tomorrow.

After writing for Metro, I’ve gotten used to pounding out copy under strict time constraints, so throwing these profiles together shouldn’t take too long. There’s plenty more to be done at ZMRC, but I’m also contemplating a side project.

I think I mentioned earlier that a local study showed that roughly 8% of young Zanzibaris use heroin. With about 65% of the population under the age of 25, that means that up to 5% of all Zanzibaris use heroin. That’s fucked up. The worldwide usage rate is about a dozen times lower.

More fucked up? The product is cut with so much flour that users barely get high and end up spending all their cash just to chase a fix. To help solve this problem, apparently one in ten heroin users in Stone Town have resorted to a gross little technique called “flash blood.” It’s simple: instead of taking out the needle after you take a hit, your friend uses it to extract your blood, then shoots your blood into his arm to get the residue of the dope. As you can imagine, a bit of a risky practice – particularly when HIV rates are rising.

I’ve got to do something about this, but it’s tough to know what. I’ve been trying to contact local organizations who might have some access to these communities: I figure I’m the last person who could convince a broke, homeless addict not to lift off so I’m better off finding people they trust.

Either way, it’s nice to put my work in context, since these madrasa preschools are giving kids a realistic chance to survive a struggling education system and give them opportunities later in life. When the average size of a single-teacher classroom is 100 kids (sharing a dozen textbooks) it’s easy to see why kids have a hard time sticking with it.

Sorry about that... A bit intense. As a change of pace, here’s three things that speaking Swahili did for me this week:

1. A dude I met on the daladala a few weeks ago called me and invited me to Pemba (Zanzibar’s other main island) for the weekend. I couldn’t go on such short notice, so instead he paid for my daladala to his home 20 minutes outside of town and introduced me to his family over a couple of sodas. I’m going there for dinner tomorrow night, and he already introduced me to the chicken we’ll be eating.

2. Stumbled across a place where a bunch of crates of Cokes being were stacked and managed to negotiate a sweet wholesale price - $6.50 for a crate of 24 (restaurants charge a buck a piece).

3. During a normal day of lounging on a hammock at the normally-empty Kendwa beach, a couple of butt-naked local children ran into the ocean, followed by their deaf older brother and eventually the rest of the entire family. After a few sentences in Swahili, I ended up swimming with them, albeit with my bathing suit.

This week’s strange Swahili lesson is a rant on family:

Mama means mother, which makes sense. Kaka means brother. You’d think dada would mean father, but it doesn’t: it means sister. So I figured papa would be father, but that doesn’t fly either because it means shark. Dad is baba. By the time I get around to this, they think my dad is my sister, who happens to be a shark.

First league basketball game tonight! Time to see if our intense, three-hour, water-deprived practices pay off in victory.